Page:Modern Views on Matter.djvu/20

 12 electricity than about matter; and the way in which electrical inertia is accounted for electromagnetically and localized in the ether immediately surrounding the nucleus of charge, is comparatively clear and distinct.

There may possibly be two different kinds of inertia, which exactly simulate each other, one electrical and the other material; and those who hold this as a reasonable possibility are careful to speak of electrons as 'corpuscles,' meaning charged particles of matter of extremely small size, much smaller than an atom, consisting of a definite electric charge and an unknown material nucleus; which nucleus, as they recognize but have not yet finally proved, may quite possibly be zero.

The chief defect in the electrical theory of matter at present is that the positive electron, if it exists, has never yet been isolated from the rest of an atom of matter. It has never been found detached from a mass less than the hydrogen atom; whereas the negative electron is constantly and freely encountered flying about alone, its mass being little more than the thousandth part of an atom of hydrogen.

Until a positive electron can be similarly isolated, the hypothesis that an atom is really composed solely of electricity, that is to say of equal quantities of positive and negative electricity associated together in a certain grouping of little bodies, each of which is nothing more than a concentrated charge of electricity of known amount, must remain a hypothesis.

7. It is a fascinating guess that the electrons constitute the fundamental substratum of which all matter is composed. That a grouping of say 700 electrons, 350 positive